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EP NNA 8 – Simple And Effective Ways Of Sourcing Note Sources

Finding a deal is always a big step for any note investor. There is also the temptation of buying from hedge funds because that means there’s less work to do. Reaching out to private sellers is a good move, too, but their assets are always the leftovers of other investors and can be overpriced at times. The secret to sourcing note sources is through public records where most information is free. This way, you find assets that other investors don’t have a clue about.

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On this episode of Note Night in America, I discussed a relatively easy way to find be it note buyers and sellers, in just about any county across America with the help of using the local county clerks’ websites. Now, not every county clerk website is going to be efficient at doing this. Sometimes, you’re going have to reach out to local title company reps and bribe them. I won’t say necessarily bribe them or wine and dine them to have them pull those lists. When we get into this episode, I definitely share how we find these, what do we search for, and some of the easiest tools that we can use to literally find thousands of note buyers and sellers all across the country. Without further ado, enjoy this episode of Note Night in America.

Listen to the podcast here:

Simple And Effective Ways Of Sourcing Note Sources

I’m always excited to be here. We’ve got some great stuff to dive into. You’re here for Note Night in America, if you’re here for something else, you’re in the wrong spot. Our episode is not about building an ROI calculator. It’s all about finding note sources or sourcing note sources. We will dive with that in a minute, but our biggest thing I want to share with everybody is obviously we have a big five-year goal. The five-year goal is to help educate and create 10,000 note investors. How can we do that? We encourage you to share this. If you’re watching this on Facebook live, awesome. Go ahead and hit share if you really enjoy this. Help us hit those goals by helping you, helping you educate your audience, helping to educate your investors for you.

That’s what we’re here to do. Who is on Note Night in America? For those who are joining us for the first time in awhile or this is your first time totally, we always have a variety of real estate investors joining us, a note investors, because that’s what we focus on is buying notes and distressed debt. We have people looking to get the notes. We have investors, we have people that are investors or other students of ours looking to learn more about the distressed note game and how they can kickstart their IRA.

These calls are recorded. Replays are available for a little while on WeCloseNotes.TV.We literally have hundreds and hundreds of videos on there for you. The audio of these, we’ve turned into a podcast, so you can catch the replays are now available on iTunes, Stitcher. We have the episodes going on the audio side of the podcast. If you’re listening to this episode on iTunes or Stitcher, or drop me an email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com. If you miss this, you catch it on the plane, you can download. You’re able to catch up with what we talked about on a daily basis. That’s available. I think we’ve had 60 downloads over the weekend.

We do have another milestone. We hit our number 83,000 downloads on an up close and show podcast, rock and rolling. Creeping a little bit closer to 100,000 downloads. I’ve had a very busy weekend working on Note CAMP 5.0.Four days of content, 30 plus speakers, two speaking rooms. Recordings are included with the ticket price. We’ll have over a thousand attendees. The $197 ticket price. You can get a NoteCamp.Live. We’ve updated the website to give you a better idea of some the speakers. We’re pretty stoked about that or at least the speakers in the time that they’re speaking. It’s taken a lot of work, but we’re really jacked up about this.

We got Alan Cowgill speaking. Arnie Abramson is going to be speaking. Walter Woffordhas agreed to speak on this thing. A lot of people are loving what we’re putting out and we hope you can enjoy that too. If you haven’t signed up, you can go to NoteCamp.Live. Click on the sign up thing. It’s $197. That’s good for you. You can watch it. You’ll be able to choose which rooms you want to bounce back and forth. We are jacked up about that.

As always, we had a big, big boost on this. We are actually going to be closing this down as far as for new members this week. Put it off for a couple of weeks for you because we really got some stuff that we want to dive into. I’m really stoked about our membership. It’s a monthly beta membership at $97 a month for the first 100 spots. We are getting very close to filling those 100 spots. With the membership, you get some discounts to some of our vendors, discounts at events like Paper Source, Quest Expo, others. Bill Mencarow is giving us a discount code for the Paper Source and Nathan Longis giving us a discount code for that.

Vendor discounts to the Law Office of Daniel Singer, Madison, Laughlin, just to name a few and more coming every day. You can get signed up by going to that exact website bit.ly/WCNMembership. We’ve got some really cool stuff lined up and we got a lot of our vendors and buddies willing to do some cool stuff. I’ll give you an example like George Antone has already agreed when he has his new book available to send me a hundred plus copies for everybody in our membership. Greg Reidand I are working on something as well as a special book for the members.

As always, we have to think Quest IRA is a sponsor here for Note Night in America. They have a special that’s going on. If you open a new IRA, ASA, HSA or any account for yourself, Quest will donate a $125 to cover your first transaction. If you want to open a new account, use the code ‘WCN’ when you open it either online or when we go on the phone, you can reach to them at QuestIRA.com or call them at 188-FUN-IRAS. I’m so excited that you’re here for Note Night in America, Sourcing Note Sources. You’re going to want to take some notes because this is going to be something really valuable.

I believe I’ve only shared this once and what’s funny is when I send the email marketing and I mentioned a couple of names in my email, one person got rid of pennies in a lot and sent me an ugly email and it was pretty hilarious. I won’t name any names, it’s funny. I like ruffling feathers sometimes in this industry. If the kettles black, it’s black. It is what it is. If you are overpriced on your assets or you pull bids from people or you’re an asshole, you’re going to get called out by me. It’s not slander when it’s the truth.

Everywhere I go, that’s always one of the biggest things I get from people. “I need to find some deals.” You’ve heard me talk about this before. You find from banks, you find from hedge funds, you find from servicing companies, private sellers, online exchanges. I have talked about that until I’m blue in the mouth. That’s no surprise. What is unfortunate is most people don’t call banks. People want to buy from hedge funds because that’s the low hanging fruit, so they’re willing to overpay. Servicing companies take a little bit of work because you’ve got to usually by in a larger portfolio from a borrower and then keep it at the servicing company. Private sellers are a great place, but often private sellers are into it too much. Let’s face it, the online exchanges usually have stuff that’s leftover or it’s picked over or it’s overpriced. It just is what it is.

Sourcing Note Sources: The online exchanges usually have stuff that’s leftover or it’s picked over or it’s overpriced. It just is what it is.

Whether you believe this or not, I am here constantly in my offices. I’m in my office and Greg and Jen and Nichole and Steph can vouch for the fact that I’m constantly like the mad scientists. What I’m trying to get at is there are ways to find assets that many people don’t realize. The thing you’ve got to keep in mind is where do these sellers, where do these usual suspects hangout at? If you think about this, the Unusual Suspects is one of my favorite movies. All time, my top four or five movies. If you think about criminals, you think about people that have a record, where do you go to find that record?

Obviously, the police can pull it up in the blotter. I’ll give you an example, the three times I’ve been arrested, the ones for in highway, once for a DWI which is unfortunate and the third one for driving on an expired license, which I goofed up on. There’s a recording system for that. It is the same thing with notes. A sourcing place. If you buy a note, there’s always two sides of a transaction. If I’m selling a note, there is my name on the assignment and then there’s the buyer’s name. Whoever I’m selling it to, there’s a buyer, two sides.

I know this sounds so simple and that’s great. There’s a mortgage that we fill out or a launch and we shipped that over to them. What needs to happen for those things to be official though? It’s got to be recorded. You’ve got to have the assignment of mortgage recorded. Where do you record those at? Your county has the County Recorder’s Office. It’s simple public records, free information most of the time. Not every County Clerk or County Recorder’s Office is as friendly as you would like them to be. You’re looking for the assignment of mortgage or the assignments. We’re going to go through a couple of things here to give you a little bit of an insight to this.

Some counties work pretty simple. You do a document search. Others you’ll be able to wildcard, others you’ve got to sign up to pay for it. It’s okay because basically what you’re trying to do is pull a list. Now, title companies can often pull this list very quickly. This is why you want to, as I call it, have stake in the line ready. You’ve got a title rep that you’ve worked with, you’ve closed deals with the area, reach out to them. That’s why I’ve got Alex because Alex has done a lot. There aren’t title company and he’s our O&E company. If you’re a client of ProTitleUSA, you use them quite a bit like we do, we’re one of their biggest referrers of business every year in and year out, he’s glad to pull some stuff for us. Where do they pull? This is my work done. I was thinking about this last September and I had been messing around with it.

One of my favorite spots is Orange County, Florida. If you’ve seen The Book of Mormon, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I reached out to somebody in his office and I said, “Can you pull from January 1st to September 26, 2017? Can you do a quick pull for me of assignments? Can you tell me how many of assignments were recorded?” It might take a gander on how many assignments recorded basically in that nine month period in just Orange County, Florida? You might want to take some while guess. The number was actually surprising for that nine-month period, it was literally 9,811 assignments were filed.

Out of those assignments, think about this, because that’s from multiple entities. That bigger question is, how many entities do you think made up that 9,811? How many you unique entities? You’d only think of 155 or 150 companies bought mortgages or bought notes in that neck of the woods. It’s 1,954. Yes. You have some of the companies like Wells Fargo and some of those guys that had multiple entities. The question is, what can you do with those? What’s that information look like? I have to give a Kayla over at ProTitleUSA big props because she literally sent me the list. Now, the better info is here is actually what are the entities names?

We have question, “Is that from both sides of the transaction?”

Yes. That’s what I’m trying to get at. This is just one county in Florida. What do you say we’d dive in and start looking at some of the things that you guys can do?1,915 total names on the assignments on both sides. You have companies like Wyndham Vacation Resorts which is a lot of this, is their condos and we have Wilmington Trust, and Wilson Resorts in Wilmington, all that stuff. They make up a lot, but the beautiful thing once you get past Wilmington is you start seeing smaller banks. Whitney Bank, Hancock Bank, Mary Jean Williams, which is obviously a private seller, Westgate Resorts, Westgate Palace, Westgate Myrtle Beach, Westgate Gateway. You start seeing some HOAs, Wells Fargo, obviously. You see a lot of Regions bank, Regions Mortgage, Renasant Bank. This is what I’m trying to tell you. This information is so valuable, it literally gives you a list of everybody that bought our note for nine months. An assignment of mortgage was filed.

What are those things that you can do with that list? I know it’s a little mind boggling. What are some of the things that you can do with this list? Obviously, you’ve got buyers and sellers on. It’s an easy thing to get to work with Google. Search for them. You see that somebody you bought a note last year, there’s a name. Reach out to him. This is just one county, nine months in one county. You want to dive in some other counties across the country?

We have a question, “Can you get a copy?”

No, you can’t. This is my list. Maybe with The WCN Crew, they might be getting a chunk of the list. Maybe they might get something. Who knows what I do for my peeps? You’re not going to pay ProTitleUSA to do this. You need to find your local title rep to do something. Not every recorder will allow you to pull a list. That’s what the funny thing. Sometimes they want you to have the name, so that’s why you need to find a local title rep that’ll help you. That’s why we talked about steak and wine. Take your local title rep out to lunch or dinner or happy hour and say, “Could you help me out with something?” They run a little bit different search than what you’re able to do.

If you have somebody who tells you it’s not worth going after these lists, ask them why? Ask them if they have done it. If they have not done it, tell him to shut F up. I say that to anybody. I’ll say this straight to somebody’s face. If you haven’t done it yourself then shut up. How many deals did you close? Did you only close 30 in the last three years? Shut the F up. If you close ten, shut up. Let’s just face it, there are a lot of people out there. There’s a lot of educators out there that haven’t bought anything in the last year, but they have to make money so they’re going to start educating on their inability to close deals. Sometimes, title companies, they have access with other counties. They can reach out to people. Maybe you need to pick up the phone and call somebody pays me for lists. I would have paid $500,000 for this list.

Sourcing Note Sources: You need to find your local title rep to do something. Not every recorder will allow you to pull a list.

We have a question, “Can a local title reps do a title search anywhere in the nation?”

Not all of them. Some like Alamo Title or Chicago Title, Independence Title can often pull some stuff for you or they have access to people to do that. Let’s go through a couple. What do you say we pull up a couple of counties and dive into it? Let’s go through some of the difficulties. If you have a local title rep and if you’ve got a local realtor in the area that would be a good and say, “Do you have a local title rep I could call?” Ask them. I’m trying to pull things so I can buy more assets in their area so that I can take more property back.

We have a question, “Can you do one in LA, California?”

I don’t believe California’s going to allow you to do this because we all can agree that they’re the Nazis out there. I have NETR Online. Houston’s a hot market, and these are all flood victims. The smaller banks’ solution is going to be foreclosed themselves, especially in Texas. That’s why I’m just talking. If you see a bank that’s outside Texas, most of the time in Texas is going to be foreclosed because it’s so fast here. For the smaller banks? They can’t afford to take a loss those stuff.

I just went and did the document type. Some people are asking me this. What I did for those that are listening to the Harris County clerk office and I just typed in it and ran. The dates from January 1, 2018 to March 14th of this year, which would have been last week and I just typed the instrument type, assignment. Each county clerk usually has a different description of what that is. It may be ASSGN, AMO, ASO, ASM. I’ve just seen a lot of different things that I do some searches on stuff.

Not every county will let you do a raw search for assignment. A lot of them, like I was just messing around in Miami Dade, if you also go to Orange County, Orlando, it won’t let me do a search. You’ve got to have the person’s name unless you have access to a title company that’ll pull it for you. There are so many sources if you’re going to put some stuff to work. This is stuff you can do at night. You don’t have to find a million sources.

We have a question, “Scott, the records we are looking for are assignment of mortgages, general best than last year, then research those names and start prospecting them.”

Assignment of mortgages, this is exactly what we’re looking for because that’s the transfer form. That’s the transfer form across every state is assignment of mortgage. Now, another thing that I have found in some of the different counties out here that’s pretty cool is I have found modifications in whatever county it was, assignment of rent, assignment of lease, assignment. We don’t want to search mortgages. We want to look for an assignment of mortgage with a mortgage that’s been sold. If we do just look for a mortgage, it’s going to run you up to this huge list of stuff that’s created and that’s not what you want. You want an assignment of mortgage.

We can agree that Wells Fargo will probably transfer it to somebody else or an assignment of mortgage will happen when the note is performing or non-performing. You’re going to have something happen. The thing to keep in mind is, is if they’re buying or they’re selling, it’s a potential source to have some stuff as well. If you have a question, I will just call the County. “How are your assignment recorded?” When a mortgage is originated, there is no assignment. You’re correct because that mortgage and then that deed is in there. Then the assignment of mortgage is then transferred. Not every state records a mortgage. In Texas, they don’t record mortgages here, but they do an assignments, it’s transferred.

We have a question, “Why record doesn’t show both grantor and grantees?”

I don’t know. I’m not going to spend my time in Orange County though. I’m going to spend it in States that I know that stuff’s going to be moving. I’m going to spend time in my top ten or eleven states. Did you get what I’m talking about here everybody? You guys can do the counting to yourself too.

We have a question, “What about some other pools like deed probate, deed family, deed deaths?”

I’m not wasting my time on those. Why kill yourself with more data when you only need to pull one list. If you want to do that, by all means go right ahead, but that’s not what I’m focused on. I’m buying mortgages. I want to use the list that I pulled and get into other sources, to get into other things that we’re looking at buying if that makes sense.

Each county can be a little bit different, which is okay. You’re probably going to buy from any of those, finance sublender, Arbor Realty, Morgan Stanley Bank, Wells Fargo Bank. A lot of these are going to major banks like Fannie Mae. This is going over to Wells Fargo. They probably have a line of credit. Michigan doesn’t surprise me because of it being close to Ohio, Corporation system. I’d make a phone call, track that number down. Registered agents do the same thing. That’s a pretty good sized bank institution on Wall Street.

Sourcing Note Sources: We don’t want to search mortgages. We want to look for an assignment of mortgage with a mortgage that’s been sold.

What I wanted to do and share with you guys is literally the fact that this stuff is at your fingertips. Don’t get me wrong. Yes. Is it going to be a lot of work? Are you going to find these bigger institutions that don’t have stuff? You’re correct. First, if you can download the list in seconds or find somebody else to do it and you could literally spend time by going through and just eliminating some of the individual stuff. Just literally go through the stuff and get rid of some of the duplicates, L2, L3, L4 or whatever it is. As far as the entities, you will find notes. You will find plenty of assets. It’s a matter of you just doing it. Assigner and assignee, look for that exactly. What questions do you guys have regarding this? Was this helpful? Did this surprise any of you like, “This is actually pretty easy.”

We have question, “Can you talk more about how to find a local title company to do this?”

Call your local realtor. “Who do you close with? Can you put me in touch with them?” “Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Escrow officer. Beth Halo is my realtor in your area. I was wondering if it was possible for you to take five minutes of your time to do a quick search for me. I want to see how many assignments of mortgages have been filed. Is there a way for you to pull that list for me for the last six months?” “Can you tell me what kind of wine you like? Because I want to shoot me some wine.” That’s what we do. What’s your favorite whiskey? That’s the whole point is that all you do is you just got to ask. It’s always best coming from a warm person. If you’ve got a realtor out of state, this is what I would do. I would probably go and use ActiveRain.com. Active Rain is this free website that really lists a lot of real estate professionals.

We have question, “What’s the best way to contact people?”

Pick up the phone and call. The MLS will not show assignments. You have probably bought and sold some notes over the last couple of years, I’d like to get on your buyers list.

We have a question, “How would you approach an attorney at pre-foreclosure to give you the lender company?”

You just have to go through them. “I’d like to try to buy your employer’s notes.”If they’re the attorney, “Does your bank that you represent ever sell the notes. I would love to talk about buying the notes,” if you’re talking with attorneys. Back to Active Rain. Stick to the point in here. Active Rain is this great online website for real estate professionals, free to get. You’re going to see my smiling face up there. What it does is it ranks you buy a points and you get points for blogging, points for logging. I’ve got 185,000 points. We got a few people following me and stalking me, which is fine. It ranks me down here. You’ve got all the title companies there, if we go back here, there are a total 100 title reps in here you can reach out to.

If you are messing around and too lazy to actually do your own search here, I don’t mind doing it once or twice but come on. Things you’ve got to realize is every county is going to have a different list you pull. Harris County is obviously different than Travis County. You don’t need too many counties, like what I would look for is if you had three or four States, just pull the biggest county or the most heavily populated county in that state and that’s really all you need.

We have a question, “Pros and cons of doing this versus calling banks.”

Not every bank is going to sell their stuff and this gives you an idea who’s actually is assigning notes every month. This shows you who’s done so much stuff over there. If you see somebody that pops up a lot in the last nine months, there you go. I didn’t pull numbers on it. I didn’t want it to pull numbers. I don’t need individual numbers. She pulled up a full 9,800.I could do a filter it by number of reps to see who’s got the most and eliminating that list slowly but surely. It’s really not that a lot of work. You can hire a VA for $4 an hour on Upwork.com to go through and just pull mailing addresses and phone

Sourcing Note Sources: It’s a lot of work, but if you’re not making an offer, if you’re not reaching the hedge funds, you might have to go direct.

You’re like, “Yes. It’s a lot of work, but if you’re not making an offer, if you’re not reaching the hedge funds, you might have to go direct. Upwork.com is where you would find a virtual assistant from anywhere. They either post what you’re looking for or you leave it open. You’ll find virtual assistants from all across the world. If you’re not the direct source, please don’t call me. You want to hire a couple interns for a couple of weeks to come in Tuesdays and Thursdays and pay him $12 an hour and he’ll knock it out and just spend time with them going through what they’re looking for trying to pull that. Honestly, that would be the best thing for you to do.

Hopefully it was valuable and hopefully you enjoyed this. Hopefully it helps you out. If you could do me a huge favor, if you’re listening to this episode on iTunes or Stitcher and you love what we talked about, please leave a review on iTunes. I don’t have anything else except if you are serious about it, get signed up for the WCN. We’re almost at 100 opt-ins with that. Once we hit 100, we’ll close it down for awhile for us to focus on those 100 people. If you get a chance to do that.

Here’s a list of the upcoming events we’ve got going on here at WCN. We have the Fast Track Training. We have the Quest Trillion Dollar Mixer in Austin, Texas. I’ll be the guest speaker. We have Note CAMP 5.0. If you have not signed up for Note CAMP, take advantage of getting signed up for that. Then our Note Mastermind in Cape Coral, Florida, Paper Source Symposium in Las Vegas. We will not be attending, but we do have a discount code for our WCN Crew members.

Go out and make something happen. I don’t mind sharing what we do here because 99% of you aren’t going to do anything. There are so many sources for you. I have people call me all the time like, “Scott, can you help me with seconds or firsts? I don’t want to call because it’s probably going to be first. If you can’t find any seconds, you’d probably need to do something different. Go out and make something happen. Get signed up for Note CAMP and we’ll see all at the top.